This week such noted guests as Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan and Jeff Bezos — chairman, president and CEO, Amazon.com — landed in Redmond, Washington for the annual Microsoft CEO Summit. Unsurprisingly, the keynote speech was given by none other than the CEO of the world's largest tech company and protege of tech pioneer Bill Gates, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer.

Ballmer is one of the most energetic and influential figures in the tech industry. He is also known as one of the most polarizing, for his wild antics and unscripted sound bytes. Thus you could virtually guarantee his keynote would be pretty interesting.

At the speech Ballmer let his fellow CEOs exactly how he viewed Windows Vista -- an overambitious product botched by a poor launch and poor timing. He stated, "Just not executed well. Not the product itself, but we went a gap of about five, six years without a product. I think back now and I think about thousands of man-hours, and it wasn't because we were wrong-minded in thinking bad thoughts and not pushing innovation. We tried too big a task, and in the process wound up losing essentially thousands of man-hours of innovation capabilities."

The admission was surprisingly forthright, when contrast with Ballmer's early statements on Vista's performance. Initially, despite poor sales Ballmer blamed factors such as piracy, refusing to blame Vista. As time has passed he has slowly grown more critical of Vista. Of course the operating system is no longer Microsoft's flagship product, so that could have something to do with his changing attitude as well.

Many analysts have been highly critical of Windows Vista's performance. The OS came at a $6B USD research and development cost to Microsoft, yet failed to come anywhere close to surpassing its predecessor, Windows XP, in market share.

The upside to that flop, though, was a rich operating system base that allowed Microsoft to push out Windows 7 -- essentially a performance tuned Vista with some extra gloss. Windows 7, by contrast, has been a wild hit, passing Windows Vista in seven months and cruising towards passing Windows XP. While that success can't entirely numb the sting of Vista among Microsoft's brass, it does provide a degree of vindication of their overall strategy.

Despite his candor about Vista, Ballmer had no qualms about saying that the super-hot selling Android smart phone operating system from Google was inferior to Microsoft's own smart phone operating systems.

In an interview with Fortune Ballmer commented, "I think what you mostly what you see in the market is that there's a lot of dynamism. You know, people are up, they're down, they're sideways, they're this. The whole market is growing. But, in terms of share and popularity there's still a lot of opportunities for innovation."

"And I think Apple did some good stuff, but they're not number one in the market. You know, number one is still Nokia, number two is still RIM. And they did some good stuff. And you know Android is done more of a... Google has done more of a software only approach. Which has advantages. That's our approach. They hit the market with a good window relative to touch."

When asked about Android giving away Android for free versus Microsoft, which charges smart phone carriers, Ballmer took issue with that assessment, stating, "And there's nothing free about Android. I mean at the end of the day as we certainly have asserted in a number of cases you know there's an intellectual property royalty due on that. Whether they happen to charge for their software or not is their business decision."

Ultimately Ballmer is right -- Android isn't free. It's certainly an expensive project for Google. However, it's hard to deny that Ballmer essentially dodged the question. At the end of the day Android is free to handset makers and consumers. That answer would be a tough one for Ballmer to give, though, when the upcoming Windows Phone 7 comes with a fee, which is ultimately passed down to the consumer. And then there's the additional fact that Android currently has some abilities that Windows Mobile does not, like copy and paste and multi-tasking. Ballmer's response, while technically correct, thus left plenty unsaid.

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First, the best antivirus for the Windows platform is MSE and it is FREE and uses very few resources.

Second, only idiots that doubleclick on executables sent from strangers or download bootleg software/media get virii anyway.

Third, if you gave up the feature and application-rich platform of Windows for the striped-down and naked offerings of a Linux build just for the fear of catching a virus you have some issues. That is like packing up the wife and kids and moving to Nome, Alaska because you heard about someone getting their car stolen at a mall.

No, I gave up Windows because I was having big problems gettin on the internet. I don't know if it was a virus or a problem with a driver that I had downloaded about a year before or something else. I downloaded Ubuntu just to see if it was a hardware issue on my computer ... well, I wouldn't quite say I never looked back, but I feel a lot happier with Ubuntu than with Windows.I don't know what MSE is, but I had tried at least one popular free antivirus product and my experience was that even if it did detect a problem it couldn't deal with it. Later on I downloaded an antivirus product that I thought was good and paid for a licence only to find it wouldn't install on my laptop and the supplier didn't seem to care two hoots. By then was running Ubuntu for surfing and the like, so it more or less pushed me into going away from Microsoft completely.Of course, there were a whole lot of issues to think about, such as inability to use Microsoft Word, which was actually a big issue for me at that time, but isn't so much now, and the limitations of Ubuntu and the other Linux distributions. Yes, I think I have tried all the more popular ones, and they all have limitations.I guess that Ballmer would say that has a cost, but so does the continual peck and hunt of checking antivirus alerts or trying to decide what software downloads to use.At least with the Linux central repository idea I know that someone has vetted the software and that it is safe to use, which saves me a ton in money as well.

Ummm ... no Word worked fine in Windows.It is arguable that you are right regarding my problems not being Microsoft's problems, especially as I had downloaded a driver relating to the network connection about a year before. However I think I suspected the problem was actually a virus, which meant that whatever the fix was, it was temporary because my antivirus software wasn't detecting it.However for Ballmer to say his system would be cheaper than Android seems a bit rich in light of the fact XP and co are getting to be of less and less importance to the end user, while the number of the malware protection products the user has to have installed is increasing, and that on the basis there is a "downtime" before a new malware protection product is installed (i.e. the computer was successfully attacked), then even "just staying afloat" is actually costing you money.

"if you gave up the feature and application-rich platform of Windows for the striped-down and naked offerings of a Linux build just for the fear of catching a virus you have some issues. That is like packing up the wife and kids and moving to Nome, Alaska because you heard about someone getting their car stolen at a mall."

First, the best antivirus for the Windows platform is not using Windows.

Second, only idiots believe that doubleclicking on executables sent from strangers or download bootleg software/media is something that the vast majority of consumers knows or cares anything about.

The graveyard of Windows hobbyests is littered with arrogant pronouncements about who is "in" and who is "out" when it comes to swimming beneath the obvious on the available UI. Nowhere on Microsoft's Web site do they make it clear that your "solution" is either easy or easily available.

"Third, if you gave up the feature and application-rich platform of Windows for the striped-down [sic] and naked offerings of a Linux build just for the fear of catching a virus you have some issues. That is like packing up the wife and kids and moving to Nome, Alaska because you heard about someone getting their car stolen at a mall."

Actually, it's more like posting a gratuitous, biased and misguided opinion on an anonymous forum...for what?

Every OS has problems. People use what they use because they like what they use, regardless of the financial and potential personal pain they suffer as a result of their choices. You're a somewhat-less-than-shining example of this.

So you're in love with Windows and you hate Linux. Great. Thanks for sharing.

The "virus" problem is more then enough to move away.Even if the AV is free in terms of money. It costs performance loss during the scans. It costs time to keep it updated. Why should i even think about viruses ?Anyway, I can't count my legal XP licenses of all flavors (bundled with PCs). I own Win 7 pro license. And still most of the time I use Gentoo on my main, Sabayon MCE on HTPC, Ubuntu on laptop. For me, the reason was ability to make my OS to be what i wanted it to be. And another big reason was data and profile migration. You know if you have TBs of music in lossless formats, over TB of your precious photos, spent hours to configure and customize each little app you use, spent days to tune your OS performance. And then you trying to tell me, that upgrading your HW is a good reason to do it again ?No, thank you. I prefer to move the disk from old computer to new one (or copy from old disk to new disk).P.S.BTW, the following said by you, just shows that you are "I know how to get to control panel in windows, so I'm power user"

quote: Third, if you gave up the feature and application-rich platform of Windows for the striped-down and naked offerings of a Linux build

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer